Commentary on life with a southern accent

Thursday, April 30, 2009

She does not go into the issue of Edwards' paternity of Rielle
Hunter's baby and the bizarre attempt to cover it up using a married
campaign worker, but she does talk candidly about the revelation of the
affair. The story is very sad, but Elizabeth Edwards is definitely a survivor.

After
the former presidential hopeful confessed his betrayal, Elizabeth
Edwards writes in her new book, "I cried and screamed, I went to the
bathroom and threw up."

...Edwards denied paternity, and his wife's book doesn't address that issue.

But it does highlight Elizabeth Edwards' anger and sorrow at being
duped by a man whose four children she'd borne and whose political
ambitions she'd passionately supported for so many years.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The obvious reason that Arlen Specter switched parties is that he
saw he could not win the Republican primary and would soon be an
ex-Senator if he didn't switch to run in the Democrat primary. Maybe
things aren't so obvious though. I just read at Politico that Joe Biden talked to Specter 14 times.

In the Democratic Party's courtship of Arlen Specter, no one may have played a bigger role than Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden has been trying to convince Specter to switch parties for at
least the past five years, but those efforts were stepped up once he
was sworn in as vice president, a senior White House official said.

Biden has met or spoken on the phone with Specter an average of once
a week since the Inauguration. And after Specter became one of three
Senate Republicans to support the administration's stimulus package,
those conversations were increased.

Maybe it was not a
desperate, last ditch effort to save his political hide after all.
Maybe Specter just wanted to shut Joe Biden up. It's not like he'd be the only person Joe Biden had driven crazy.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Earlier Kim Priestap wrote
about Dick Cheney's request that additional memos be declassified so
that the American people could see the rest of the story, regarding the
intelligence obtained through enhanced techniques used by the CIA. It
might not even be necessary to view additional memos to show that, if
the media would report the full contents of the memos that have already
been made public. I had not seen the following anywhere in the media
until reading it in the The Washington Post today (thanks to a link from Lucianne.com):

In
releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program
last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to
question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently
false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public -- in sections that
have gone virtually unreported in the media.

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that
"the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations
has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular
attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the
CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical
information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed]
and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." The memo
continues: "Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted
giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting,
'Soon you will find out.' " Once the techniques were applied,
"interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well
as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda
and its affiliates."

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the
discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian
operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los
Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at
Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest
building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information
obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin,
better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a
17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second
Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could
be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

Here is more from the same piece by Marc Thiessen:

Critics
claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because
people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos
note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced
techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted
by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the
limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and
physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their
faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they
are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief
that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is
inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the
terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak
freely.

This is the secret to the program's success. And the Obama
administration's decision to share this secret with the terrorists
threatens our national security. Al-Qaeda will use this information and
other details in the memos to train its operatives to resist
questioning and withhold information on planned attacks.

When people turned out all over the country in the thousands to
attend tea parties, the explanation from critics was that the protests
were from "fake" grassroots,
not "real" grassroots. Those people didn't get in their cars, take time
from work, find parking in downtown cities, show up in the rain, etc.
on their own. NOOOOO! Fox News did it all. Fox somehow has control over
those people and forced them, against their will, to go to the trouble
to make signs, interrupt their normal activities, pack up the kids and
their diaper bags and strollers, travel to their nearest tea party
site, find a parking space, walk to the protest area and raise their
signs and their voices. No wonder they fear Fox so much. Fox's control
over their viewers is un-freaking-believable. And Fox is the number one
cable channel.

The
Teabaggers are convinced that Obama is going to raise their taxes, the
result of unsubstantiated Republican claims - repeated over and over
again by FOX News anchors - that Obama is going to raise taxes on all
Americans.

Obama's Making Work Pay tax cut reduces income taxes for the vast
majority of families by $800 this year. The RNC is distorting the truth
with the help of ally FOX News, and some misguided Americans are buying
it.

Our goal is to let FOX News know that Americans are fed up with their bias and misinformation.

With your help, we will build a coalition which proves that the Teabaggers are not the silent majority but far-right radicals.

Not
just lame, but ignorant and uninformed. That is not what the tea
parties are about. They are about opposition to our tax money being
spent in a reckless, foolish fashion and at an unprecedented rate,
tripling the deficit with thousands of earmarks and tons of pork. They
are about a bunch of politicians who signed onto a spendulus bill they
didn't bother to read and that they rushed through before anyone else
had time to read either. They are also about the government taking over
private enterprise -- determining the salaries of privately employed
individuals, demanding resignations from US executives and even getting
into the business of guaranteeing our automobile warranties.

It's not rocket science. Read a few of the signs and you really
should "get it." Stop the spending. Get out of our business. Let us
keep more of the money we make. Stop the bailouts. Just common sense.
Are they really this blind and ignorant or do they just refuse to let
their followers know what is really at issue?

Even more lame: Silly, nasty little jokes about "teabagging." If you don't understand the reference you can look it up here where you will also see this definition of a "teabagger:"

2.
n. A conservative activist who is so ignorant that they protest against
tax cuts (that benefit them) by throwing tea into a river.

Billy Ray cheered while he watched the teabaggers protest on FOX news.

Did
any conservatives throw tea into any rivers today? Does any tax that
adds thousands of dollars of debt to your grandchildren and gets spent
on pork really "benefit" anyone who works for a living?

I did an unusual thing tonight that not many people do. I watched
Keith Olbermann. He is one of the most clueless of all. He kept trying
to make the point that those attending the tea bag protests were stupid
because they did not realize that they are really getting so much more
for their taxes than they realize. He pointed out that Texans got back
a certain amount of cents on every dollar they sent to Washington. This
is NOT what the protests are about. Many would gladly turn down those
funds coming from Washington (and some governors are doing just that)
because they don't want the federal control, or would prefer not to
spend their grandchildren's money to bail out Wall Street bankers or
people who bought houses they couldn't afford or to make up for the
taxes that Obama nominees neglected to pay the IRS. People do like to
get government freebies. Heck, they figure they are paying out the rear
so they might as well get something to show for it, but I think that
mentality is on its way out. Americans are waking up to see the
ultimate cost, not just to them, but to their children and
grandchildren and to their freedom, is not worth it.

Olbermann is perpetually angry and snide, that's his shtick, but one
CNN employee took the cake as the rudest bully I have ever seen
masquerading as a reporter. Behold.

Did you catch the recurring theme? The "reporter" tried to tell the
protester how much money the Obama administration was giving him. Sigh.
They just honestly don't have a clue. It almost makes you feel sorry
for them, doesn't it?

Update: Just another thought... when liberal
unions bus people to protests and when liberal groups pay people to
protest, the media does not deem it worth reporting. But if a cable
news channel decides to cover (and announces that they will cover) a
protest taking place in all 50 states there is a sinister plot. The
media does not know what to think of the tea parties and they are
freaking out. In the process they are, once again, providing irrefutable evidence of their extreme bias.

Update II:Doug Ross
compares the coverage CNN and other MSM gave the tea parties to the
coverage given to Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink protests against the war
in Iraq.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

People too blind or stupid or delusional to acknowledge what is in front of their eyes, hundreds of protests involving thousands of people in all 50 states across the country today, are going to be in for a big shock.

Just turned the TV on and decided to see how (or if) the MSM was covering the tea parties. CNN is predictable as heck. I predicted the tea partiers would be portrayed as voters were in the 1994 elections. After Democrats were trounced in 1994, in reaction to the first two years of the Clinton administration, those in the media declared voters were "angry white males." I turned CNN on and the first thing I saw was the part of their iReport segment captioned "Tax Day Tirades."

A brief interview was shown of a tea party attendee who said the tea parties are about people from all political parties gathering to get back to the principles and values the country was founded on, less government, helping the market grow through business, helping small businesses. She said that government was a little out of control and people weren't having a voice anymore and they were interested in educating people about the things the country was founded on. That is a pretty good representation of a tea partier, even if she was introduced with a "tirade" graphic.

What immediately followed that interview were the real tirades:

Reporter Tyson (I missed his last name): Now Tony we've been hearing some really strong opinions from our reporters today, particularly those who are actually opposed to these tea parties. I want to play a couple for you. There's one that says basically, "It's time to stop whining after eight years of tax breaks." Another who says "These tea parties are nothing more than a conservative stunt." Let's go ahead and take a listen to these:

Webcam iReport video from Egberto Willies "It is unAmerican for those who have so benefitted from the tax code to want a tax cut at this time. Most Americans that complain about too many taxes likes to pay very little taxes themselves. Our roads, bridges and other infrastructure are crumblin'. Our healthcare system is a disaster. Do you think this can be fixed by less money into the government coffers?"

Webcam video from David Seeman: "You know the conservatives haven't been very graceful losers in my opinion. If I wanted to stand around all day long, sipping tea and listening to conservative Republicans whining and lying about how Bush's eight years in office were this time of unprecedented economic prosperity, this absolute fantasy time that never actually existed in reality, I would probably just turn on Fox News or listen to some good old fashioned crazy right wing radio."

Tyson: All right Tony, yeah, pretty powerful.

Obviously the "absolute fantasy" is that anyone at any of the 800 or so tea parties ever claimed Bush's eight years were times of "unprecedented prosperity." It is also a mischaracterization to say the tea parties are about people who "likes to pay very little taxes themselves" asking for additional tax breaks. It is quite apparent who is doing the "whining and lying." Are these people just absolutely ignorant of what is going on at tea parties or are they intentionally lying and mischaracterizing them? Are they just repeating what some liberal bloggers have told them the tea parties are all about?

Tomorrow, my husband and I will be venturing into the wilds
disguised as a news crew to do some in person interviewers with
teabaggers here in Rhode Island (if we can find any). We’ve got some
questions lined up to ask, but I’d love to get suggestions!

The great thing about owning professional video equipment is
that armed with it, you can pass yourself off as being a professional
news crew pretty easily.

So tomorrow, “WSFR” is going to send a cameraman and on air news
personality out into the field to cover this “teabagging” phenomenon.

We’re going to ask open ended questions that seem to have a
slight conservative bent to (hopefully) get them to open up and just
start ranting. Then, we take any examples of racism, hatred, ignorance,
and stupidity that we catch on camera and make a little movie out of
it. Probably a YouTube special.

Here’s the list we have so far

* What are you celebrating (The Boston Tea Party), and can you
explain its historical relevance? [We're hoping to get some hilarious
flubs from this one]

* Is this your first time teabagging? [OK, so, a juvenile one, but worth it]

* Do you approve of Michael Steele’s plan to expand the GOP
through a “hip-hop urban-suburban marketing strategy”? [hoping to get
some juicy racist stuff from this question]

* (as an intentional misunderstanding/follow up, presuming that
someone complains about wasteful government spending) “So you
disapprove of your tax dollars going to the Iraq War?” [should elicit
some confusion]

Anyways, it’s a start… but I’d love to have some suggestions for
questions that sound fine, but should prompt an outpouring of crazy.

Thanks in advance, and I’ll be sure to post a link to the finished video when it’s available!